ENTRY 00Archive · policyPUBLISHED 2026-07-25

Decided while calm, for the days that will not be.

Written before the outcome is known: what happens at each level of drawdown, what would pause contributions, what would cause a sale, and what happens to the reports when life interrupts. The point of writing it down now is that it cannot be quietly rewritten later.

What I will do when it goes wrong

Written 2026-07-25, before the outcome is known.

This page exists because patience is easy to claim in advance and hard to prove afterwards. Every commitment below is written while Bitcoin sits roughly 48% below its October 2025 high, at the start of this chapter, with no idea what happens next.

If anything here ever conflicts with what the chain shows I actually did, the chain is right and I failed.

Contributions

$1,000 goes in every month, on payday.

The amount does not change because the price went up. The amount does not change because the price went down. I am not promising to buy extra during a crash — promising money I may not have is exactly the kind of claim this site exists to avoid.

Drawdowns

At −50% from the high: contributions continue, unchanged. No sale.

At −70%: contributions continue, unchanged. No sale.

At −80%: contributions continue, unchanged. No sale.

The repetition is the policy. There is no level at which a falling price triggers an action, because a plan that changes when it hurts was never a plan.

Selling

No price triggers a sale of the hold. Not a fall, not a rise, not a milestone.

The hold is sold when the goal is reached, or when a documented emergency requires it. There is no third case.

Withdrawals

Money may leave the wallet only for a genuine emergency — something that threatens my housing, my health, or my ability to earn.

If that happens, the transaction is on-chain and visible immediately, whether I write about it or not. I will publish the amount, the date, the reason and the on-chain reference within 30 days, and the archive will carry it permanently.

I am not promising this will never happen. I am promising it will never happen quietly.

Pauses

If my income stops — job loss, illness, a cost I cannot carry — contributions pause.

A paused month is published in the same month, with the reason. The streak is marked paused: not unbroken, and not broken. A record that hides a pause is worth less than one that shows it.

Contributions resume at the full amount when income does. A pause is never used to wait for a better price.

The sleeve

The trading sleeve stays capped: 1% of net worth risked per trade, never more than 15% of the portfolio. Every closed trade is scored in R and published, winners and losers alike.

Kill switch: if the sleeve's cumulative realised result reaches −5R within one halving cycle, the sleeve closes for the rest of that cycle. No re-entry, no exception, no argument that the next setup is different.

A limit set in advance means something. A limit invented after the loss does not.

Reports

One report a month. No exceptions.

The minimum acceptable report is three sentences and a link to the chain, and it is always better than a skipped month. If a month gets only the minimum, that is itself information about what was happening.

Ending it

If three consecutive months pass with no report, this project is over, and I will publish a closing entry saying so — what went in, what it became, and why it stopped.

A project about proof owes a final entry more than most. Sites do not get to die quietly.

Changing this page

This text can be revised. It cannot be revised silently.

Every version is hashed and dated. Previous hashes stay listed, and previous text is never removed. If a commitment here becomes one I no longer intend to keep, the honest move is to change it in public and let the record show that I did — not to delete it and hope nobody kept a copy.

Subscribers receive the current hash with every monthly email. They hold copies I cannot edit.

The hash

SHA-256 · facd8637bdaa0f11c57d7d7528535c3a638e2333c0a464297efa1c26761f5298

What is hashed: the raw bytes of the policy source file, exactly as stored — UTF-8, LF line endings, no normalisation, no trimming. Those same bytes are served verbatim at /api/policy.txt, so the recomputation is one line: curl -s soundmoneydiary.com/api/policy.txt | sha256sum.

A hash proves that two texts are identical — nothing more. It does not prove when this text was written; that witnessing comes from the monthly email, which carries the current hash to subscribers the site owner cannot edit.

Revisions

If this text is ever revised, the revision lands here with its date and the prior hash. A silent edit is the one thing this page cannot survive, so edits are loud or they are not made.

2026-07-25Revision 1 — ratified. sha256 facd8637bdaa0f11c57d7d7528535c3a638e2333c0a464297efa1c26761f5298